CSE 872:  Project 1 - Baseline understanding

This document describes the requirements for Project 1 in CSE 872.  The project will be due Monday, October 6, 2008 at 11:59pm.  The project is an individual project. 

Your assignment is to create a simple interactive graphical application.  Your program can be a game, a drawing application, or just about anything you can think of that meets the requirements listed below.  The basic idea is that you can create a program in OpenGL that does something interesting and that you are familiar with the basics you need for such an application.  If you're rusty, this is a good chance to catch up a bit.

You must speak to me about what your project will be prior to starting.  I'll let you know if I think it's sufficient for this project.  I will also be open to bending the rules if the project warrants it and makes up for it in other ways.

Note:  If you prefer to do this application in Direct3D (or any other reasonable system) that is okay, though you must be able to provide me with a Visual Studio project that will compile and run on my machine (Visual Studio 2005, Windows XP, DirectX 9.0).  Do not submit a project that requires graphics extensions specific to some graphics card.

Your project must exhibit the following characteristics:

• 3D.  Your project must be 3D!  No 2D projects will be acceptable.
• Scale.  You must declare a scale for your project and stick to it.  Your units must mean something and it must be obvious that your units mean something.  No arbitrary boxes in various arrangements for example.  There must be something "familiar" in your scene to indicate your scale makes sense.
• Objects with holes in them.  Something in your project must have a hole in it. 
• Interaction with the mouse.  You must have some interaction using the mouse beyond just changing a camera angle.
• Gravity or some reasonable related force. 
• Independently moving objects.  At least two things must move by themselves. 
• Texture mapping.  You must select and load at least 4 textures.  I don't care where you use them, as long as they are actually used. 
• Lighting.  You must utilize at least two lights and the lights must be in the scene, not at infinity.
• Realism.  Something about your project should be trying to look real, not "computer-graphicy"
• Curved surfaces of some kind.

Pitfalls

When this project is graded, we will be specifically looking for the following problems that you should avoid:

• Missing polygons.
• Overlapping polygons at the same depth.
• Bad vertex normals (yes, I know how to check them)
• Objects which we can see through when we should not be able to see through them.
• Building your entire scene from boxes will result in a 50 point deduction.  No more than 50% of your scene can be built from boxes.
• Time must make sense.  If your object travel 60MPH or the speed varies on different machines, I'll count off.
• Seams that do not match (lighting and textures).
• Redundant embedded polygons.  I have no problem with a few of these, but if more polygons are embedded in an object such as your floor than are shown, we will be penalizes.
• Redundant loading or creating of data structures.  Especially don't load your textures over and over again.
• Large polygons that prevent the lighting from working properly.